The Disappearing College Male

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The “college for all” crowd laments that too few Americans are getting university diplomas. They also lament that some qualified minority and first generation college students are “under-matched”—they do not go to the best schools available for them. But little attention is given to the quantitatively vastly more important reason why the proportion of Americans with degrees is not growing faster: the substantial underrepresentation of men on college campuses. For every four women graduating from four year colleges, there are only three men. If males graduated from college in the same proportion as women, there would be about 14 percent more college graduates each year –over two million more over a decade. An under-discussed issue is: why aren’t men going and graduating from college as much as women?

Before getting into that, I want to make it crystal clear that I do not subscribe to the view that increasing college attendance and graduation would be a positive development –indeed, I think too many people graduate from college, and that, at the margin, the return on college training is now pretty low for a lot of prospective college students in America. If anything, the problem is closer to “too many women graduate from college” rather than “too few men get college degrees.”

But why the gender differences? My favorite decidedly left-wing advocate for colleges, Tom Mortenson, offers a partial answer in the January 2015 issue of Postsecondary Education Opportunity. Bad things happen to teenage males far more than to teenage females. Relative to women, for example, young (15 to 24 year old) males are over four times as likely to commit suicide, nine times as likely to be murdered, and for those under 18, about 25 times (!!!) as likely to be imprisoned. They are also less religious - but far more violent.

Number of Male Graduates with Bachelor’s Degrees Per 100 Females, 1976 to 2010

The table provides some more detail. Before 1980, males were in a majority –easily, on college campuses (the numbers for, say, 1960, would show even greater male dominance). The phenomenon of the disappearing male began in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s, and the post-1990 decline has been more modest (indeed, the gender balance seems to have been relatively stable since the late 1990s). While the decline in the male role on campuses is notable among all racial groups, it is especially startling amongst blacks, where women graduates outnumber men nearly two to one. In percentage terms, however, the decline among Hispanics is even more pronounced.

The increased violence of male teenagers and young adults noted above is systematic of a much broader problem: the decline in the traditional two parent family, and, associated with that, the sharp decline among males of their traditional adult roles in society: providing income for their spouses and children. This is particularly true among racial minorities. A colleague of mind once perceptively said, “The black family survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws and lynching, but could not survive the Great Society.” Males in particular have been neutered by the Entitlement Society and the Welfare State. Groups which have the most contact with the welfare state, especially through various public assistance policies, such as racial minorities, have seen the greatest amount of male neutering, and thus the greatest decline in university graduation rates. The government, not males, provide incomes for many single parent families—it is the females who bear children who have historically drawn welfare benefits --so what do the young men do? They are often frustrated, angry, and violent.

The decline in the primary male economic function –working- is large. In 1960, almost 79 percent of men over the age of 18 worked—a half a century later, that proportion had falllen 15 percent points, to under 64 percent. By contrast, among women, the employment-population ratio rose more than 18 percent points. Three-quarters of the difference in working between the sexes had disappeared. While demographic changes and a revolution in thinking about women’s role in society are important, the work disincentives associated with public assistance and related welfare stare measures (expanding disability programs and extended unemployment insurance benefits for example) contributed. Among blacks, the problem was even more pronounced—in 1960, a greater proportion of adult blacks worked than whites; by 2010, 59 percent of whites worked, compared with 52 percent of blacks.

As the centrality of work among males declined, so, apparently, has their ardor to go to college –why bother? Why do well in high school? Viewed increasingly negatively by society, men have engaged in increasingly violent, anti-social behavior, manifested in more of them rioting, taking drugs, and ending up in prison. Society urges women to study the STEM disciplines, but not men. My university has a Women in Science initiative, but not a Men in Science one.